School of Music

Dr Amanda Villepastour

Overview

Dr Amanda Villepastour is currently Chair of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. She is a graduate of the University of Western Australia (BMus, composition) and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London (MMus, PhD ethnomusicology), where she completed her PhD in 2006. Her research interests include the music of Africa and the African diaspora (with a focus on the Yorùbá), gender, linguistics, religion and music, organology and popular music. Dr Villepastour’s first monograph entitled Ancient Text Messages of the Yorùbá Bata Drum: Cracking the Code (Ashgate, 2010) is a linguistic study of the drum’s speech surrogacy system. Her forthcoming book entitled Wood that Talks: The Yorùbá God of Drumming in Transatlantic Perspective (University Press of Mississippi) is a multi-disciplinary edited collection about a transatlantic religious drumming tradition in Nigeria and Cuba. She is currently undertaking research in Cuba and Reunion Island.

Before coming to Cardiff, Dr Villepastour was a founding curator at the Musical Instrument Museum (MIM) in Phoenix, Arizona, where she built the African collection and gallery. Prior to MIM, she was Ethnomusicology Instructor at Bowling Green State University. Dr Villepastour was awarded two consecutive postdoctoral fellowships at SOAS, University of London (2006–2007) and the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2008). Before her re-entry into academia in the mid-1990s, Dr Villepastour had a prestigious career as a keyboardist in the popular music industry, writing, recording and touring with British artists including Boy George, Billy Bragg and The Gang of Four.

At an undergraduate level, Dr Villepastour currently co-teaches the following courses and seminars: ‘Music in Human Life’ (Year 1), ‘Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective (Year 2) and ‘Project in Ethnomusicology’ (Year 3). At a postgraduate level, she teaches: ‘Music in Africa’, ‘Methods in Ethnomusicology’, and ‘Music and Language’. She chairs the Postgraduate Forum and co-ordinates the Guinean ensemble called Lanyi and also The Gamelan Ensemble (commencing October 2014).

Publications

Forthcoming

(ed.), Wood that Talks: The Yorùbá God of Drumming in Transatlantic Perspective (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, forthcoming)

Review of Fiddling in West Africa: Touching the Spirit in Fulbe, Hausa, and Dagbamba Cultures, by Jacqueline Cogdell DjeDje, Notes, 66/2 (2009), 284–86

‘Two Heads of the Same Drum? Musical Narratives within a Transatlantic Religion’, Journal of Transatlantic Studies, 7/3 (2009), 343–362

Other Output

Entries on Yorùbá musical instruments in the Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments, Oxford University Press.

Journalistic articles and reviews in Straight No Chaser (1999–2003) and Glendora Review (2003).

Research

Amanda Villepastour has researched diverse comparative aspects of Yorùbá music in Nigeria and Cuba, including technical studies of drum language and melody setting, and Yorùbá gesture and dance. She has also undertaken extensive transatlantic ethnographic and musicological research of orisha music and religion, employing interdisciplinary methods drawn from ethnomusicology, organology, linguistics, anthropology and religious studies. Beyond her specialized research of Yorùbá music and religion, Amanda has wide interests in Africa where she has travelled extensively. She is currently researching maloya music in Réunion, and is also working towards publishing her experience in 1980s pop music.